Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference 2012

Today was the 2012 Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference in Salt Lake City. I had a great time seeing old friends and learning at the sessions.

The first session speaker was J. Mark Lowe. He spoke on creating an advanced research plan.

Lowe covered a lot of ground, including recommendations for several products to help you collaborate and report back to clients. He mentioned LiveBinders.com to create a three-ring binder on the web that can be private or public with PDFs, web resources, notes, etc.

Another suggestion was Oneeko (one echo) to share with up to eight users. ScreencastOMatic allows you to record video from screen with audio, annotations and animations.

On the research side, one tip that struck me was to look for doctor journals for evidence of births, etc.

Next, I listened to Thomas MacEntee talk about giving virtual presentations. He had a ton of advice on everything from gadgets to services to dos and don’ts (as a presenter and as an audience).

The last presentation I attended was There’s an App for That by Laura Prescott. She had a great idea to use iMapMyWalk, which allows you to add photos to a map and can be handy for walking a cemetery.

She reminded us that the Ancestry app features those infamous leaves, which allow you to check out potential records related to your ancestors.

I definitely need to check out DocumentsToGo, which features many useful tools like word count and others. It looks very handy.

Finally, I downloaded Photoshop Express. It’s free! I had no idea!

I skipped the last session of the day (I was feeling antsy and decided to take a gym break). Then, I headed over to the Salt Palace to register for RootsTech and met up with a bunch of friends that I had heretofore only known online: Footnote Maven, Elyse Doerflinger, Russ Worthington and Denise Levenick (whom I had met briefly the day before). Kim Cotton joined us too. We all went out for a great dinner at PF Changs and then several of us hung out in the lobby of the Radisson, gabbing and having fun. I can’t wait to see more folks tomorrow as RootsTech gets underway!